Dissertation Defense Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Na’ama Av-Shalom “Trajectories of Epistemic Reasoning in Science: Socially Negotiated Configurations of AIR Components”

Science is a social practice involving epistemic reasoning with and about shared questions, and methods and criteria towards developing epistemic products, like theories or models of phenomena, evidence, and arguments. Epistemic reasoning can be understood as entailing three components—aims, ideals (criteria for meeting those aims), and reliable processes for achieving them. These components are established socially by the scientific through epistemic discourse. Similarly, students and teachers can engage in discourse towards establishing the aims, ideals, and reliable processes that underpin the epistemic reasoning of their classroom communities. Using the AIR model of Epistemic Cognition and the Apt-AIR framework, this research presents an analysis of the discourse in a middle school science inquiry intervention to explore how aims, ideals, and reliable processes get taken up in classroom discourse and how are they negotiated over time. The research also explores how the borders between epistemic components are fluid, highlighting how the class community may dynamically reconfigure, for example, an ideal into a reliable process. The findings highlight five trajectories which differed along various lines—whether they were more student- or teacher-led, what about the components the class discussed towards developing shared understanding, and the extent to which reconfigurations of components happened or were taken up. This dissertation furthers our understanding how classroom communities socially develop their epistemic reasoning, and of whether and how students’ and teachers’ considerations affect the trajectories of change of the aims, ideals, and reliable processes that the class develops and uses.